FISHES OF THE BAHAMAS, JAMAICA 



liave seen men at Tarpon, Texas, fishing for this wonderM leaper 

 ■with a big cotton line not over fifty feet long. The tarpon never 

 gained a foot. The finest Spanish mackerel fishing I ever saw 

 ,was going on at the same time with that of the tarpon, and one 

 day I found myself with about thirty men, women and children 

 in the Pass angling for Spanish mackerel. I was using an eight- 

 oxmce trout rod and was angling for sport. The rest had ten- 

 foot bamboo poles with ten-foot lines, and were fishing for the 

 next winter's food supply. I remember I caught four, while my 

 amazed next-door neighbour took forty, and he was amply justi- 

 fied, as he needed them. The fish were three or four pounders, 

 radiantly beautiful in their tints of silver, yellow and blue, qtuck 

 as a flash of light, dashing this way and that, coursing along the 

 surface to the song of the reel. They caught five to my one, 

 and laughed at me heartily, until a big man-eater shark came 

 along and broke up the fishing and the angling party, literally 

 driving the women ashore in sheer fright. 



The Spanish mackerel, Scomberomorus maculatus, is a valu- 

 able game fish, as the catch of a recent year brought in to the men 

 in aU the United States nearly $75,000,000. This little mackerel 

 attains a weight of ten or eleven pounds, but five pounders are the 

 ones generally caught. The Texans were salting down the 

 Spanish mackerel for the winter, literally joining business with 

 pleasure. One woman was carefully skinning a fish to get the 

 silvery skin to cover a box, while others were collecting all the 

 tarpon scales they could find. I have often wondered why some 

 ingenious milliner did not perch certain fishes on ladies hats, until 

 one day I met a woman coming down the walk at Avalon with 

 the wing of a flying fish on her hat, doubtless, the first to be so 

 used. It is more than remarkable that the fishes have escaped 

 the fate of other animals so deftly outlined by an American wag 

 in the BrooJdyn (New York) Eagle: 



' Maby's Attiee. 



' Mary had a little Iamb — 



'Twas Persian on her coat ; 



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